Morton was undoubtedly a racist and a sexist, and he had preconceived notions about the superiority of white men over all others. Nobody denies that, and the Lewis et al paper acknowledges it. They even bemoan having to print Morton’s racist terminology.

Your criticism of this blog post seems to be that it doesn’t go into every detail of Lewis et al’s criticisms of Gould and Gould’s criticisms of Morton. That’s irrational. To repeat everything these scientists criticized about each other, along with the original research, would take up many volumes. In fact, it DOES take up many volumes. You’re claiming ignorance because the article doesn’t go into detail, but yet you argue against others’ points and refuse to educate yourself on the materials, even by simply reading the referenced study (which is quite short and easy to read).

If you REALLY want to know what’s going on, you can read Morton’s three volumes of data (“Crania Americana”, “Crania Aegyptiaca,” and the “Catalogue of Skulls of Man and the Inferior Animals”) which are all available on Google Books for free. You also can read Gould’s “Miseasure of Man,” in particular Chapter 2 where the bulk of his criticism against Morton resides, along with his 1978 paper (I don’t have the title off hand, but it’s cited appropriately in “Mismeasure”) that provides the tabular data not presented in the book. Finally, you can read the Lewis et al study refuting Gould and exonerating Morton’s data (but NOT his racist conclusions). Once you’ve read all that, perhaps you will have a better idea of why this blog post couldn’t go into the kind of detail you are criticizing it for not having.

One note: Morton DID see a correlation between brain size and intelligence. From “Crania Americana” (p. 8-9): “The _first_ proposition, that the size of the brain, other conditions being equal, is in direct proportion to the power of mental manifestation, is supported by analogy, by several well known facts, and by high physiological authorities.” He considered the correlation between brain size and intelligence already to be proven. His effort in the “Crania” volumes and final catalogue was to confirm that different races had different average cranial capacities (and, therefore, different-sized brains), such that they could be ranked. He believed his data (which, according to the Lewis et al study is accurate) proved this. Where I think Gould still holds the higher ground is that Morton never considered other possibilities for the different brain sizes, such as climate, sex, etc. (some of Morton’s sample sets were all male, and for others the sex couldn’t be accurately determined).

As I said before, I was not sure (It had been a while since I read either Gould or Morton) and the article above doesn’t mention it.

>B. The paper does discuss the reasons why Morton measured the skulls. It was in hopes of figuring out whether humans were one species or several, one of the biggest questions of the day. Morton doesn’t really mention intelligence at all.

This strikes me as disingenuous hair-splitting. A major underpinning of the multiple origins theory was the idea that people who were not of European origin were not human. And in Morton’s time, scientists firmly believed that humans were superior to non-humans.

Ergo, intelligence certainly came into it. So did many other unpleasant ideas.

>C. So Morton didn’t go in assuming that brain size and intelligence were correlated. In fact, he wrote the opposite: “A well-formed head is no evidence of superior intellect.”

“Well-formed” is not the same as size. It was another common idea at the time that the shape of the head and facial features determined personality and moral character. This assumption was separate from the size of the skull itself.

>D. Gould’s mistakes go well beyond just failing to “fact check” Morton’s measurement – read the paper or some of the more thorough coverage.

I’m talking about the article, here, which discusses more sources of criticism than that one study. Therefore, it works best to analyze said article separately from the paper you cite. If the article doesn’t mention something in the paper, then that thing should not be used to support the article. If it were a good point, the author should have put it in.

>E. It was 1000 skulls, not 100. And the paper discusses the impact of stature and sex.

According to the article, it was 100 not 1000. The paper is not what we’re discussing here.

>F. Nobody said Morton was unbiased. In fact, the point is that Morton *was* biased. But his measurements and reporting of them were not (contra Gould).

The article doesn’t support this. And there are two different points the article is trying to make, neither of which is fully supported because each depends on the other (which is a logical fallacy). One is that Morton’s work wasn’t biased, despite the fact that even his supporters admit that *he* was. The other is that Gould got him wrong. It is entirely possible for only one of these statements to be true. Gould fudging data about Morton doesn’t automatically make Morton’s work unbiased.

I should also point out the third, unacknowledged point underpinning the whole enterprise, which is that either of these noted scientists having been wrong, biased, or prone at times to fudging would make their entire body of work invalid. I trust we can all see why that would be a questionable conclusion, at best.

@Kiwiguy
You seem to have missed Demian W and Day Brown’s points that there is far more to intelligence and brain density than just the overall size of the brain. Also, as Dr. Gould himself did once point out, these 19th century scientists were usually measuring the capacity of skulls, which is a very different thing from measuring the contents.

Further, if brain size and intelligence were directly correlative, tall men with large heads would always be smarter than everyone else. Which would make a lot of football players geniuses.

“Imaging studies of intelligence and brain structure. Correlations between intelligence and total brain volume or grey matter volume have been replicated in magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) studies, to the extent that intelligence is now commonly used as a confounding variable in morphometric studies of disease. MRI-based studies estimate a moderate correlation between brain size and intelligence of 0.40 to 0.51 (REF. 28; see REF. 29 on interpreting this correlation, and REF. 30 for a meta-analysis).

]]>By: Lakita Thomurehttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/study-stephen-jay-gould-crusader-against-scientific-bias-was-guilty-of-it/#comment-27837
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 06:29:00 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=29687#comment-27837Wonderful website. Plenty of useful info here. I’m sending it to a few friends ans also sharing in delicious. And certainly, thanks for your effort!
]]>By: Daniel J. Andrewshttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/study-stephen-jay-gould-crusader-against-scientific-bias-was-guilty-of-it/#comment-27836
Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:40:13 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=29687#comment-27836Re: Sagan and nuclear winter. The late Stephen Schneider discusses his falling out with his friend, Carl Sagan, over the nuclear winter issue in his book Science as a Contact Sport. Sagan ran with the nuclear winter idea even though evidence against it was very strong, and Schneider had the unpleasant task of contradicting Sagan. He writes how Sagan ignored evidence that contradicted his idea even though he’d just discussed it with him (Schneider). Sagan also misrepresented the findings of at least one of the papers he used as evidence.

Thanks for pointing out the evidentiary bias in Wikipedia’s treatment of nuclear winter. The real question is : Why other to correct it if it gives its author’s joy?

Nothing succeeds like semantic aggression and the scientific meltdown of the original apocalyptic hypothesis has no more removed the neologism from use than the remaindering of the book Sagan and Ehrlich wrote to tout it. Not much air time is wasted nowadays on warnings about The Energy Crisis and Y2K, and the only folks dedicated to keeping nuclear winter alive are those who invested their credibility in the original , apocalyptic hypothesis. One arrived at by invoking the precautionary principle to justify worst-case values for all thirty of the parameter choices that went into what was bizarrely styled ” a sophisticated one dimensional model.”

Their collective problem is that , thanks to the PR firm hired to promote it, the original hype was so over the top that sober research could only drive the topic in one direction. Down- , by two orders of magnitude from a 22,000 degree day worst case in the 1983 climate model to just a few hundred today- replacing twenty below zero with single degree cooling means no more snowball earth.

After Sagan jumped the shark on the Kuwait fires, , the literature flatlined , The spectacle of the original researchers writing ‘review articles ‘ about their own work has not done much to redeem the subject, but their perseverance in front loading the Wiki with Cold War factoids reminds us that one of science’s Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not covet thine own hypothesis is often more honored in the breech than the observance. Sagan’s insistence that “Apocalyptic predictions demand , if they are to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence ” has come full circle — history is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver.

Nuclear winter wasn’t shot down by the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Beck’s of the 1980’s . It took climate scientists of impeccably liberal credentials who feared for the credibility of their profession on the eve of the global warming debate to rein in Sagan’s ill starred end run on the Nobel peace prize.

]]>By: Day Brownhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/study-stephen-jay-gould-crusader-against-scientific-bias-was-guilty-of-it/#comment-27832
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:33:53 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=29687#comment-27832Jared Diamond followed a New Guinea Highlander into the forest & listened to him expound for hours on the minutiae of the flora & fauna drawing on an encyclopaedic scale database in his head. Back in the village, when he cannot remember all this, the villagers think Diamond is retarded; yet the same men cant deal with simple algebra. Who is it that getsta decide what ‘intelligence’ is?

Missing from the analysis is the ratio of grey to white matter. The white cushions the grey, and increases if a skull is subjected to blows, especially in childhood. Also, its what causes boxers to be ‘punch drunk’. Nobody measured the cost of non-white moms not making sure their kids wore helmets on bikes, or tolerating the rougher play or what we think is physical abuse.

Missing from the analysis also is consideration of the cultural effect of Europeans needing to spend so much time packed in together every winter to stay warm, and the intolerance of physical violence cause the kids and women are close enuf to be “ancillary casualties”.

This has something to do with why tropical hunting tribes have 20 times the signs of parry fractures in their graveyards compared to European yeoman farmers. Note also how commonly photos of African men show the front teeth bashed out, while our Neanderthal ancestors died with fuller dental sets.

]]>By: Demian Whttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/study-stephen-jay-gould-crusader-against-scientific-bias-was-guilty-of-it/#comment-27831
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 14:51:48 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=29687#comment-27831It is not the size of brain but the density of the connections that counts. To be fast and loose with my references I believe that current brain research on invdividuals over 50 show a prononced reduction of brain size over time. Before this was used to explain senility and alzheimers. The research actually found that over time the brain’s connections did not disapear but instead grew denser. So the only effect is a reduced short term memory capacity, but no actual reduction in intelligence. I do not doubt that this translates to this discussion and that size does not in essence determine intelligence.
]]>